Being an Halo fan and a recovering wargamer, I was aware that McFarlane Toys had come up with a line of miniatures called Micro Ops, but as a whole, I found these sets to be way overpriced at the time of their release.

Fast forward to summer 2013, the stores carrying the line began to realize these were not moving at all, so they start trying to aggressively clear their stock, which is when I decided to dip my toe into the line by picking up one of their smaller sets, the ODST Drop Pods.

The pods are made from silvery gray plastic and nicely detailed on the outside. Each Pod has a removable frontal hatch as well as additional panels that slide out and to the sides for a better view of the inside of the capsule.

The inside of each Drop Pod displays a control seat and very little else as far as details go. I do find the inner hinges on the lateral pod panels to be very distracting at this scale, but then again, since these Pods are made of plastic, making the panel pieces thinner would have increased the risk of breakage.

The air brake stem in the “falling” pod is glued in place, but both pods can use the support stand and terrain base indistinctly. The support is made from the same gray silvery plastic as the capsules while the terrain base is in essence a hollow tan plastic shell with some pebbles sculpted on the outside and an indentation to hold the pod hull.

Each one of these pieces received a thorough shading wash that serves to enhance the sculpted details and very little else for decoration, other than a few tiny red triangles painted on the hull of the pods, solid black panels to simulate windows and a dash of dark olive green for the passenger seat.

The figurines included are made from black rubbery plastic and are as detailed as one would expect 1:100 scale military figures to be, which is really not much, especially considering these are massively produced bits of plastic.

The figurines all seem to have one solid coat of paint and a heavy shading wash with their helmet visors and few solid black pieces of gear painted on top. The end result is not very pretty, but these look as good as any pre-painted wargaming miniatures done in this scale.

Each character is attached to a comparatively large round base and therefore none is actually designed to interact with the Drop Pods, which is my main point of contention.

McFarlane should at least have included a sitting figure to go inside one of the Pods and given the full MSRP, I would have expected the pods themselves to be diecast items. Instead, what I got was a couple of cheap plastic toys and three rubbery figurines whose bases use up more plastic than the actual characters on top.

Since I got this set really cheap, I felt I should not be too harsh on the critique, but unless you can get it for under USD $3.50 or an equivalent amount, I would not recommend this set except to the most hardcore Halo fan.

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